The Funhouse Massacre(2015)
Movie Review
Directed by: Andy Palmer
Written by: Ben Begley
Story by: Ben Begley and Renee Dorian
Starring: Jere Burns, Scottie Thompson, Matt Angel, Clint Howard, Mars Crain, Sebastian Siegel, Candice De Visser, E.E. Bell, Chasty Ballesteros, Renee Dorian, Sterling Sulieman, Ben Begley, Erick Chavarria and Robert Englund
Synopsis: Six of the world’s scariest psychopaths escape from a local Asylum and proceed to unleash terror on the unsuspecting crowd of a Halloween Funhouse whose themed mazes are inspired by their various reigns of terror.
There may be so slight spoilers ahead so proceed at your own risk
Review: I’ve seen this movie sitting on the shelf at my local Wal-Mart for months now. While I thought it looked cool, I knew nothing about it, so I never picked it up. That was a mistake. I finally picked up the Blu Ray and after watching it twice in 2 days I can honestly say I love it!
Let’s start with the cast. Everyone plays their parts well. All of the main character, for the most part, are likeable characters. I was torn between cheering for a brutal killing and being bummed because a character I like died.
Robert Englund has about 5 minutes of screen time in the opening and it’s a hell of an opening.
Writers Renee Dorian and Ben Begley are standouts as Lori and Deputy Doyle respectively.
Clint Howard plays one of the killers, The Taxidermist.
Let’s move on to the killers.
The killers were all very different from each other and seem to represent different types of horror.
We have: a female clown who tends to get a little knife happy (who’s alter ego earlier on in the movie is Ms. Quinn, a nice nod to the DC character.), a taxidermist who kills and stuffs people, a chef who killed and cooked and ate his customers, a dentist who kills his patients, a masked wrestler clown who kills people with his bare hands and a cult leader who lead one of the biggest mass suicides in history.
The kills were pretty graphic which I liked. It seems like a lot of horror films nowadays shy away from gore. Not this one.
Here we have: Slit throats galore, broken necks, impaling via bathroom coat racks, heads smashed by giant mallets, drills through heads, heads being cut off and used as pom poms, heads being torn off, people being gutted and more.
Now if gore isn’t your thing you should still give this film as shot for the humor.
This main cast is extremely witty and funny and alot of jokes and gags come from the fact that no one really knows for part of the movie that these killings are real. Everyone thinks it’s part of the show.
Another big source of humor is Deputy Doyle sucking hard at his job. He seriously can’t do anything right. In his first scene on screen he contaminates an entire crime scene. If you are annoyed with his ineptitude, stick with it. Over the course of the movie he evolves into the teams resident badass.
My only real complaint is the killer miraculously survives ending but I’m going to give it a pass on that one because it sets it up for a sequel that I would love to see.
The Funhouse Massacre is a brutal, bloody slasher with a witty sense of humor that could be the start of the next big slasher franchise.
Score: 9.5 out of 10.
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